Oyekun Kana

Aye lived with Olokun. He knew all her secrets, but he distrusted her because of a conflict she had once had with Orishaoko. Aye, for her part, went through periods full of sorrow, with shame and a trace of resentment.

One day they went out for a walk. Olokun felt very much at ease in paradise, and they decided to visit Obara Darare, the land of the awó Obara Yire. There Aye began to sing, and Olokun remarked: “We will see what she does and what will happen, because I do not want her daughter to be like the mother.” Obara Yire wanted to know what was wrong with the mother. Olokun answered that she had every fault possible in a woman, and that was why he kept her as a slave; but he did not want his children to inherit any of them. Olokun also sang a chant. Obara Yire asked him why he was acting this way, and Olokun explained that Aye was going to curse, and that from that curse worse things would be born into the world. He promised that he would see it with his own eyes and that they would spend seven months with him.

After that period, Aye had a girl of great beauty. When the little girl had grown a bit, she showed amazing knowledge: she was lerifun lodikua. With this Olokun showed Obara Yire that the daughter would not resemble her mother. Aye, however, was upset about the way her daughter had been born, and she wept a great deal.

Later Aye began to curse the land of Obara Darare, where they lived alongside Obara Yire. The awó had a wife, Doyebelde, and seven young children. Just as the curse was spoken, some of them became adodi and others alakuatas. Doyebelde told her husband nothing. He had gone to ask Olokun for advice about what had happened with Aye’s daughter, and Olokun asked him to come along to see what his children had become. On reaching his house, Obara Yire saw with his own eyes the state of his children.

A very restless and stubborn child always did what others did not do. Although his mother advised him often, he never paid attention to her. One day he went off to the forest, a place his parents had forbidden because of the great danger he would face there. As soon as he arrived he saw a shrub that caught his attention. It was really the god of the forest, and the child destroyed it. The god watched this act, enchanted him, and left him imprisoned.

Elegba, who saw what was happening, sent the goat to protect him. The goat went up to the shrub and with its horns damaged another piece of it. The god thought it had been the child again and was filled with fury against him. At that moment Ayaguna, the representation of Oduduwa, appeared and explained to the god of the forest that the culprit was not the child but the goat. Then they blamed the goat.

Leri Ofo was born as a girl lent to the earth out of charity, and for that reason a great ceremony of supplication was needed, to be held before her third birthday. Her parents left it undone. She grew up accompanied by an already materialized spirit that looked after her like a father, even though in its last life that spirit had been a woman.

As a young woman, Leri Ofo chose a husband: a man she liked and whom the spirit rejected. From then on her life went off course. The spirit managed to seduce her, she found no joy beside her husband, and she began to notice other men. She ended up joining with a friend of her husband, by whom she conceived a child.

The spirit did like this man. What it really wanted was to push her into the life of sexual excess that the spirit itself had led when it had a body, moving from one man to another without settling, and that is what happened. While she slept, the spirit ordered her to take certain drinks to abort and to hide it from her husband. However, the child was omo Shakuana, and came into the world with spots and sores over all its skin, a result of its mother's excess. She herself fell ill with the sickness the spirit had suffered before its fall.